While there is general consensus that Freemasonry originated in the
British Isles, the exact line of descent (direct or indirect) from the
Operative stone masons remains an oft posed question. Although the
"Direct" argument has the most supporting evidence, the problem of a
final resolution of this question remains complicated by the dearth of
primary material.

The occupation of "stone mason" began in the British Isles about the
beginning of the eleventh century and received great stimulus after the
Norman Conquest. The occupation was broadly divided into two strands --
the Hewers, who worked in the quarries rough shaping the stones and the
Layers (or Setters) who worked on the building site(s).

Until the Elizabethan era they were engaged almost entirely on cathedrals,
churches, abbeys and castles which often took an inordinate time to
complete. While each building site was under the direction of a Master
Builder or Master Mason, as with most members of a recognised craft, the
stone masons were also organised under the protection of craft guilds
which had arisen as guardians of the interests of the skilled workers -- a
kind of medieval unions. But, importantly, the guilds also required their
members to regularly (if not frequently) attend church.

Frith, or family peace guilds, existed in London about the middle of the
tenth century, while the first merchant guild is believed to have
originated in Dover about the middle of the eleventh century. Although
weaver guilds also appear to have also originated about the same time,
there is not doubt that the Craft guilds in Britain were well established
by the reign of Henry I (around 1135).

On each construction site was erected a small, dedicated building called a
"lodge" which served as a repository for their working tools and as a
meeting place and school room for apprentice stone masons. Not only
practical instructions were imparted to the apprentices, but evidence
suggests moral and ethical teachings, modes of recognition and all matters
relating to general conduct were imparted in the ceremonies lodge meetings
held on Saturdays at high twelve. All apprentices were obligated and
indentured in the ceremonies lodges and candidates for promotion were
likewise examined, tested for proficiency, obligated and entrusted in
these lodges.

Most members of the craft guilds could readily find employment at all
levels in the society from the large projects to cottage industries. But
major construction programs were expensive and rare. As each phase of the
building was concluded or local requirements for their labour exhausted,
some stone masons may have been forced to leave and travel to a new
building site to find continued employment. Their trade and skills could
be confirmed by certain signs, tokens and words which would serve as
introductions and certification in this largely illiterate society.

In the earliest days, many of the established lodges must have worked
independently since travel was difficult, dangerous and time-consuming.
Nevertheless there is evidence that annual assemblages were probably
taking place in the 1300's. It was these gatherings that Henry VI in
1436-1437 sought to prohibit by Royal Statute.

Under the Guild system, many families rose from serfdom to become
successful employers in a few generations and the system was highly
successful until the Reformation. At this time, Henry VIII confiscated
most of the Guilds' possessions and his son, Edward VI, in 1547,
confiscated nearly all the remaining Guild funds that had been dedicated
for religious purposes. The Guilds that survived developed into the
Liveried Companies as we find in the City of London today.

The records suggest that the stone masons were probably the worst affected
by these travails and many of their records were destroyed.

The direct case argues that, in the seventeenth century, lodges of stone
masons which controlled their trade began accepting men who were not
stonemasons -- non Operatives -- and called them "accepted" masons. Over the
subsequent years, the numbers of accepted masons grew and transformed the
Operative lodges into Speculative lodges. The evidence in support of this
comes primarily from Scotland where the minute books of Scottish operative
lodges shows that from 1599 onwards in addition to the management of the
masons' trade, some form of ritual work was being undertaken.

We must be careful to distinguish between Operatives' ritual (their body
of stone masons' customs, craft lore and professional 'secrets') and
non-operative ceremony which contains a nucleus of catechisms and esoteric
teachings. Our earliest evidence as to the contents of the
non-operative, Craft ritual is from a series of Scottish Masonic
aide-memoirs compiled c.1696-c.1714 which show ceremonies as practiced at
that time. They depict a rite of two degrees -- Entered Apprentice and
Master or Fellow Craft -- each containing an obligation, 'secrets' and a
series of questions and answers. The texts contain nothing that might be
described as "Speculative" masonry and on these documents alone there is
no grounds to infer that the same ceremonies were practiced in England.

If you accept the present-day sense of the adjective "Speculative" as
applied to the Craft, it is highly improbable that such a definition
would/could apply to the seventeenth century lodges in either Scotland or
England.

So, while the Direct case relies of the Scottish evidence, there is not
extant record of the form or nature of the rituals worked in the
transitional operative-to-speculative lodges. Without the details of the
rituals, the accepted masons in Scotland may not have had any links with
Speculative freemasonry and it may be they may simply have been honorary
members or patrons of the operative lodges.

Lodge minutes of Aitcheison's Haven shows non-operative admissions in
1672, 1677 and 1693 and the membership roles at Aberdeen in 1670 shows ten
operative and thirty-nine non-operatives drawn from the nobility, gentry,
professional men, merchants and tradesmen. Yet the lodge continued to
conduct itself as an operative lodge.

While the purely operative antecedents of the Scottish lodges made them
reluctant to change to non-operative workings, seventeenth century minute
books of Scottish operative lodges increasingly show the admission of
Accepted Masons and, by the eighteenth century, they had in fact lost most
of their Operative functions.

So you can perceive of a three-stage development: Operative Lodges to
Transitional Lodges to Speculative Lodges.

But this appears confined to Scotland.

In England it is as if Freemasonry sprang into existence fully formed
without a trail and development period. A kind of Speculative spontaneous
generation.

The earliest operative lodge in England whose records survive is the Lodge
at Alnwick in Northumberland. The records show a code of operative and
"moral" regulations drawn up in 1701 and so far as can be ascertained, all
members listed as being admitted at this time were operative masons.
Surviving minutes of another operative lodge at Swalwell in Durham are
sufficiently similar to confirm that these lodges are representative of
their time -- purely operative lodges with no non-operative members.

This is not to say that operative lodges did not exist before that time.
The existence of semi-permanent groups of stone masons forming themselves
into lodges in England before the seventeenth century is, however, purely
speculative (no pun intended), for there is no evidence by which we could
prove that they existed. The Reformation, when Henry VIII confiscated most
of the guilds' property and his son, Edward VI, in 1547, took possession
of nearly all the remaining guild funds, virtually destroyed the stone
masons who were perhaps the hardest hit by these confiscations of
property. Henry VI in 1436-1437 had sought to prohibit the annual
assemblages of the guilds. So the guilds, and by extension the masons'
lodges, had a history of opposition to their existence in England.

Yet in 1646, Elias Ashmole was made a Free Mason in a lodge specially
convened for that purpose. Ashmole, in his account of the ceremony,
recorded the names of those present and none were operative masons or had
any connection with the craft of stonemasonry. Other seventeenth century
evidence from England shows similar events -- the lack of operative lodges
and the making of Free masons by other Free Masons with no operative
connections.

Supporters of the direct argument will dismiss the lack of
Scottish-equivalent evidence in England by claiming that it must have been
destroyed. Certainly this was a time of great upheaval. However, their
claim that close ties with Scotland and England making the English
experience in the development of Accepted Lodges from Operative ones
parallel that in Scotland, ignores the very real differences in political,
religious, legal and social development between the two countries.
Indeed, for much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Scotland had
closer links with France than with its southern neighbour.

Supporters of the Indirect case have approached the problem from a
different viewpoint but not asking HOW or WHEN, but WHY Freemasonry should
have developed in the first place. Why should non-operatives wish to
become Accepted Masons? Why should they turn the trade orientated
organisations into a Speculative Art?

By studying primary material some interesting insights become apparent.

The REGIUS MS of c.1390 has a purely operative content. By 1583, the
GRAND LODGE #1 MS contains much that is of no relevance to Operative
Masonry but highly relevant to Free Masonry. These documents are,
respectively, the oldest and third oldest version of the "Old Charges".

The historical period of the GRAND LODGE #1 MS was one of political and
religious intolerance in England leading to the Civil War. It is argued
that the Society of Freemasons was founded by men of peace who wished to
end the religious and political strife of their day. To achieve this,
they founded a brotherhood in which religious and political dissent had no
part, belief in God was tantamount, and members were dedicated to
brotherly love (tolerance), relief and truth. Thus men of differing views
could meet in harmony.

It was common practice at that time to teach and pass on philosophical
ideas by means of symbolism and allegory. As the primary aim was to
"build" a better man/nation in a better world, the form of the old
operative building lodges was adopted with the working tools as symbols on
which to moralise. What better allegory could there be than the
construction of an actual building? In spite of high levels of
illiteracy, the great majority of men were familiar with the Bible -- the
central source of allegory -- and the only building mentioned in the King
James version is that of King Solomon's Temple (although there are
conflicting descriptions between Kings and Chronicles).

Harkening back to Ashmole, you will note that, at the time of his
initiation (1646) the English Civil War was at its height. Ashmole was a
Royalist who had been captured by parliamentarians and was on parole at
the house of his father-in-law (a leading Parliamentary supporter in
England's north-west). Importantly, the lodge that convened to initiate
Ashmole was a mixed group of Royalists and Parliamentarians.

In time, the English Speculatives never doubted that their craft had
descended by some torturous and probably untraceable route from the
medieval stone masons' operative lodges. Nor did it concern them that men
of all races, creeds and walks of life met together in their Speculative
Lodges. However undemocratic the external English society might be,
within the Lodge, all men were equal.

Yet the egalitarian nature of the English Freemasons did not extend to the
Continent. The absolute monarchy and lack of democratic institutions in
France and else where on the Continent ensured Freemasonry was effectively
the province of the nobles and professional classes.

Freemasonry was seen as an extension to their other social activities or
as a path to esoteric knowledge. The three Craft degrees with their
unassuming ceremonies and direct moral message were too simple and too
dull. Membership had to be justified by showing there were other, more
elaborate purposes and a more illustrious origin than could be found in a
"mere" reconstructed building guild.

On 21 March 1737, Andrew Michael Ramsay presented an address to the Grand
Lodge in Paris in his capacity as Official Orator, As a result, the
history of the Craft took a new direction.

On the whole, Ramsay's speech was unexceptional, but he began to emphasise
the hypothetical and fanciful origins of Craft as an order founded in
antiquity and revived in the Holy Land during the Crusades.

The idea of a medieval chivalric antecedent for Freemasonry struck a
receptive chord and within a decade a host of new rites and degrees based
on the ideals of chivalry and contemporary notions of knightly practices
had sprung up in Germany and France.

It must be emphasised that Ramsay himself did not found any of the
additional degrees and he made no reference to, for example, the Knights
Templar. But the notion of a Masonic descent from the Templars became
firmly embedded in the romantic mind of continental masonry.

Outside the lodge room we hear many and varied statements as to what
Freemasonry is all about. Whilst most of the assertions contain an
element of truth, they all too frequently assign excessive importance to a
subsidiary aspect of our Craft, to the extent that the true purpose of
Freemasonry is obscured.

What then IS Freemasonry? The speculative free masons who drafted our
first ritual in the 1700's said that freemasonry was a peculiar system of
morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. This IS what
true Freemasonry always has been and always will be.

There is a wealth of information regarding Freemasonry on the WWW. Check
it out, you may be surprised and certainly enlightened!